But American progress is senselessly hobbled by a broken democratic model that has failed to rebalance policy making power toward the democratic center as people have moved into cities and away from the family farm. Until the country enacts reforms that fix this imbalance, other countries that find their way to greater dynamism by emulating the best of US policies may find they are leaping ahead of America.

And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution. Add in a well designed skills-based immigration process and you have the recipe for something great. I am not saying Canada doesn’t have its problems (First Nations reconciliation and poverty, protectionist industries such as Telecoms to name two), but the political system is more adaptable and these problems can be solved.

I’m less optimistic that the US will fix its democratic imbalance.

Feel free to move to Canada if you want half the wages, twice as expensive housing, and a multi-year wait to get a family doctor. There is a reason why so many Canadians end up working in the US on TN or H1 visas.

Canada heavily subsidizes the healthcare and post secondary education of all those people who then move to the US, often those people move back in retirement for the healthcare.

That no doubt has a detrimental effect on the Canadian economy as Canada pours resources into people and America reaps the benefits of that while Canada suffers.

The problem is that Canada's healthcare system is a command economy. The government decides how many med school spots there are, how many residency places, and how many procedures will be funded each year. In order to keep costs down this results in rationing. You can't even pay out of pocket - it is against the law for Canadians to purchase private care in Canada. The end result is that people with means end up going to the US, and everyone else waits 6-12 months for medically necessary hip or knee replacements. Even critical medical imaging is backed up weeks. I know someone who waited multiple weeks for urgent cancer screening. The same scans are available in the US in 24-48 hours, for a few hundred bucks.

While some of the issues that Canada faces are definitely self inflicted as you describe, the ultimate source of all of Canada's problems are that it is an American vassal state. This relationship results in Canada subsidizing the development of many talented individuals who then make the totally rational self-interested decision to move to the United States where there is significantly more economic opportunity for them. Not only is this a massive drain on Canada's resources and it prevents Canada seeing a return on the investment that it makes in people who are often their brightest and best.

For many Canadians visiting America is a trivial drive across the border, in fact some Canadians make this trip weekly for access to cheaper consumer goods. Hell, I just looked it up and I can get a round trip ticket to Las Vegas for $160 CAD and I'm no where near the border. Hell, I remember a boss telling me that he used to get round-trip tickets to Vegas for $60 and him and his buddies would go there on long weekends. Canadians can travel visa-free and stay in the US for 6 months.

Many younger Canadians who are interested in immigrating may already have grandparents who spend the winter in places like Arizona or Florida[0] so they can draw on the experiences and resources that their grandparents have to make the transition easier.

Additionally most Canadians are native speakers or near native speakers of English usually with accents that are identical or easily masked to blend in with Americans. Canadians who have attended post-secondary have attended institutions that are quite similar to American ones and their accreditation is easily transferable.

I'm not too sure on the specifics but I know that it's easier for Canadians with certain post-secondary education or trade tickets to get work visas in the United States under NAFTA/USMCA.

Culturally speaking the sports are very similar, there are MLB, NHL, and NBA teams in Canada, music is the same, fashion is the same, the food is the same. It's less relevant in the age of the internet but when I was growing up I could watch many local TV stations from the US and watch the nightly news in obscure places like Spokane.

All of this is due to the cultural assimilation and defacto integration of Canada into the United States.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-snowbirds-u-s-winter...

Well except for Quebec, the Indigenous tribes, and the monarchists/loyalists, who definitely are more doubtful and will likely never allow a full integration.

The media environment is also still substantially different, previously even more.

- The US government also effectively decides the number of US residency places by how much they will fund Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

- Many places in the US won't see you if you are on Medicare.

- It is quite common to need to wait 6-12 months to see specialists in the US too.

This is Denmark's model and it works very well. Denmark is considered the easiest to do business in Europe, and #4 globally (https://www.copcap.com/news/denmark-is-the-easiest-place-for....).

Banks seems exempt from this. I’m not financially savvy enough to know if bailing out banks is good or bad.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/governmen...

But for core commercial actives it seems like a fair observation.

I agree that utilities are a special case. The main point is that you don't want them to fail at all, ever. If they do fail, well, there aren't any good ways for that to happen.

Banks are squarely on the infrastructure side. They're a foundation that people rely on to do the really interesting stuff, and as such should be 1) low risk, and therefore 2) not profit-maximizing.

I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but this is my conclusion after spending 25 years growing up, living, working and building startups here.

The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next to destitute people but the rich are perfectly fine with this as long as they can have their nice houses and neighborhoods. Or that there are significant part of the population who can't get meaningful healthcare.

Despite what you read online, the amount of Americans who see unsheltered homeless on a daily basis is very low.

- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today released its 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) Part 1 to Congress. The report found 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2022 (https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HU...)

- Largest college football stadium: Michigan Stadium (Ann Arbor, Mich.) 107,601 (https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2018-07-30/25-big...)

- The population of Baltimore, MD is 576,498 as of the last census, so would be a closer point of comparison.

    Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting

The key TL;DR determination factor (there are others, read for yourself) is this:

    In order for a block to qualify as urban, it must have a den-
    sity of 1,000 people per square mile (ppsm).

I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person outside a major city... you just don't see it in suburbs or rural areas.

Again, major problem, it's just that most Americans don't see it on a regular basis... which perhaps is part of the root of the problem. Makes it easy to ignore.

I'm most familiar with Philadelphia where you'll either see multiple homeless people every day... or rarely. Depends on where you live and work. Every other city I've been to in my life seems similar.

Anyway, I don't want to get too far in the weeds with my nitpickery. I don't even remember what we were originally talking about!

Instead of being in the middle of the city, there are entire tent metropolises hidden in the woods in Berlin.

The US is below most of Europe per capita in homelessness.

Reading the , the stat on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... for the US is ~500k, while the page linked in the table, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S..., starts with "In the United States, the number of homeless people varies from different federal government accounts. In 2014, approximately 1.5 million sheltered homeless people were counted." so the higher ~1.5M would seem to correspond to the definition for number reported in the table from France.

It says it operates on that principle, but the stranglehold that establishment industry has on the country says otherwise.

Consolidation of capital and political power is exactly what we're seeing in banks, fossil fuels, mega-agri-firms, retailers, insurers, and healthcare providers. All of it results in a nightmare that is 'not working' for the public, but works very well for the people at the top.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

All of the empirical evidences indicates this slows economic development. Individuals being responsible for their own safety nets is more efficient, and creates better incentives, than large government bureaucracies socializing the cost of safety nets.

This capital is managed by the individuals who will derive the entire benefit from it, so they are incentivized to manage it effectively, and not hand it over to inefficient union-run bureaucracies, which give their employees early retirement at 55 with massive pensions:

https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...

They are also incentivized not to be lazy and draw upon it, as doing so hurts their own interests, by depleting their own savings.

When people pay for their own expenses, their incentives are aligned with the goal of national economic efficiency.

Government, meanwhile, ultimately becomes a rent extraction mechanism, no matter what its ostensible purpose is:

https://twitter.com/SpencerKSchiff/status/125276128577685913...

When you're falling out of a plane, it doesn't matter how strong your incentive to fly is. You aren't going to grow wings by incentive alone.

It's not a perfect system with no one falling through the cracks, but it is a system more resilient to systemic collapse as seen in the USSR when it went bankrupt, and one that produces greater economic/social development overall.

The zero-risk bias means people prefer to bring one type of risk to zero, even if it means increasing overall risk. I believe that is what's at work with government-provisioned social safety nets. Economic growth reduces a host of risks. But a social safety brings one type of risk - that is actually quite insignificant relative to the rest - to zero. So people are willing to trade economic growth for unconditional social safety nets.

Microsoft has entered the chat.

The main thrust was that someone from Chicago can easily start a job in New York with little to no cultural adjustment or misunderstandings.

In Europe, the situation was quite different with e.g. a Spaniard working with Germans etc. The claim was that someone ended up writing a book called "Managing Spaniards if you are a German".

Like, is it winning to have the option of starting a company that produces generational wealth for yourself, while living in a city unable to solve its homelessness problem? Is it winning to be a 1%-er but have no safety net so that you're always precarious, at risk of being wiped out by factors you have no control over? Is it winning to have a school system so dysfunctional that you send your kids to private schools that most of your neighbors can't afford?

I expect that from a perspective that prioritizes stability, safety, and sustainability, a model where it's hard to be fired and companies are encouraged to take long term responsibility for their employees (and therefore grow slowly) makes a lot of sense.

This is an excellent point. America does an exceptional job of making rich people richer, but it also ranks poorly in many quality of life metrics. It is now #25 on the social progress index (https://www.socialprogress.org/). If people are richer but their children are more likely to die in child birth (U.S. ranks #50), or be murdered (U.S. ranks #137 in homicide), is that really better?

My point is the USA has a very different distribution that’s relevant.

As for a “social progress index”, who cares whatever that made up thing is. How about a better indicator like how many millions of people are lined up trying to live here? I think that’s a better measurement.

Our system isn’t perfect and some people have had unfortunate luck by not having insurance when a medical emergency came up. But that has nothing to do with what the conversation was.

Building quickly and creating good, reliable jobs don’t have to conflict.

In the tech industry it is generally 3 months and they don't want you to work during that period.

The other problem is that tons of European talent keeps going to the US. The people who have the skills to make higher wages might not care about inequality too much, since they would be the ones benefitting from it. I am not sure how Europe can solve that though.

Now, as much as we can’t consider China’s success without considering the lack of freedoms inscribed within the communist social pact, we can’t take just the good of American capitalism by only using gdp or trade volume as an indicator, because - again - inequality and lack of basic human needs and life safety wouldn’t be included.

Reference: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

All did it in the 1980s - 40 years ago. All did it without oppressive communism.

>Check your perspective.

>All did it in the 1980s - 40 years ago. All did it without oppressive communism.

Japan industrialized long before 1980 and all the countries listed have miniscule populations compared to China. The only country you can really attempt to compare to China's scale is India but good luck landing the same poverty alleviation conclusions.

That's a good point. It'd be useful if the US could raise it's game for it's citizens, and let them participate in that too. :)

Maybe there's some marginal effect in the willingness of established companies entering risky new business.

In my country (belgium) in case of a mass layoff the employer has to first work together with unions to find a way to keep the employees on board, and when no alternative is found has to help the employees find a new job. Also, for workers who were hired long enough ago they may fall under an employment regime where the notice period keeps going up, and may become as much as 15 months. That law was changed a number of years back, but existing contracts were grandfathered into the old system. That may complicate the decision over who to fire.

It was a mess, and in the meantime most of that office was at best worthless / some folks just disruptive.

Many of these were capable people, highly employable, but they weren’t productive at all during this time.

I got along with some folks in that office, I really don’t think all that time did them any good. I think the intent behind the laws in play at that time and how individuals used them was very different.

For tech companies in particular hire fast/fire fast seems to have worked well. It creates a more competitive labor market. That makes sense because tech is a new industry where things are changing all the time, skills are evolving, so it benefits from a labor pool which can adapt quickly.

Is it good for workers though? Many people would say it isn't great. You become an employee for the sake of stability and in a hire fast/fire fast culture, you have less of that. It's not so good for quality of life when you're always afraid of losing your job.

The counter-argument is that in a situation where it's hard to replace people the cream doesn't necessarily rise to the top and there are less opportunities for top performers to get paid what they're worth (a common complaint in European tech). If you don't mind getting out there and marketing yourself and playing the job market aggressively, you can make a lot of money. If you would rather avoid all that it's a source of anxiety and something you want to avoid.

One place where I think the US system has it wrong though, is in tying health care to employment. This is catastrophically bad from a quality of life standpoint and bad for keeping the labor market fluid as well because it creates perverse incentives which are unrelated to whether someone's actually good at their job or not.

Overall I'm personally of the view that it's good for different parts of the world to have different ways of doing things, and if you truly can't stand the overall package you're getting on a particular continent, maybe you should move. (I did and I don't regret it. I might do it again one day. I am continually surprised by how many people seem to utterly hate the place they live, and yet don't leave it!)

But ultimately I don't think it is labour laws that made it so that OpenAI is American and ChatGPT was developed in the US. That is just one aspect of a much bigger picture.

Adding friction to that leads to a less productive economy.